


Robophobia (And How To Cure It)

by lost_spook



Series: Happy Endings, Hasty Exits [6]
Category: Doctor Who (1963), Kaldor City
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Phobias, Robots, Serial: s090 The Robots of Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-14
Updated: 2011-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:21:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The Robots of Death</i> - Leela: This savage makes her own decisions (as ever) and Poul wonders how mad is a man with Robophobia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Robophobia (And How To Cure It)

**Author's Note:**

> NB. Apologies, because this really isn't meant to be as flippant and simplistic about some matters as it probably seems... There are limitations to a series of short, odd AU romances.
> 
> Warning: Spoilers for the Fourth Doctor episode _The Robots of Death_.

_Poul: "You must be stronger than you look."  
Leela: "And you must be stupider than you look if you think I killed him."_  
(The Robots of Death)

***

Walking corpses. That bloodied hand and vacant face proved the final straw even as his own deductions were too effective to deny the truth any longer. That truth was potentially big enough to shatter their culture, but first it broke his mind and he lost himself in fear and nightmares that had become reality.

Hysteria. Breakdown. Madness. Grimwade’s Syndrome. Robophobia. No matter what you called it, it was all the same in the end and he was left a useless, pitiable wreck of a man who couldn’t take the realities of life, never had. He could hear Uvanov sneering now.

*

He woke screaming, but someone pressed him back down firmly and said, “Ssh. They have gone.”

*

When it happened again he pushed the hand aside and sat up, finding that he was facing Leela, the savage girl the Doctor had brought with him. He had a feeling that this had happened over and over during the long, blurred nightmare - however long that had been. It might have been days, or months, or hours, but surely not mere minutes.

“Lie down,” she said firmly. “There is no need to fear. The mechanical men are not here. They are all de- de-activitated.”

He wondered how long she had been there; the oddity of it roused the reasoning side of his self. “You,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You are feeling better?”

It was not truly a question. He forced a smile and answered that he was, since it was undeniable. He wondered bitterly how long that would last. One glimpse of another of those things – impassive, inhuman; their utilitarian purpose hidden under an elegant shell - and perhaps that would change again. Maybe they said something about his society, expressed in a lifeless thing that yet had some sort of life. Or himself, if it came down to it.

“Then you should eat,” said Leela, supremely practical and unheeding of all his invisible phantasms and forebodings.

She left in search of something and he couldn’t entirely bite back the amusement.

*

Leela brought the food and departed, but she promised to return in the morning. When she did, he was pacing the room, waiting for her.

“Good,” she said, with a note of satisfaction in her voice, as if his current state was her own handiwork. Perhaps it was. “You are still yourself.”

He turned. “For what little it’s worth. What are the others saying about me?”

“Does that matter?” she countered.

Poul raised an eyebrow. “It depends. If Uvanov is threatening to kill me, it might.”

“He would prefer that you helped with the work, now there are no mechanical men to do it.”

Again, he found amusement creeping back in. “I can imagine. What about you?”

“I do not blame you,” she said, lifting her head. “I know that not all wounds can be seen - and I did not like the creepy mechanical men, either.”

He smiled. “That wasn’t what I meant. Somehow I thought you and the Doctor would have disappeared as mysteriously as you had come and yet here you are.”

“The Doctor left,” said Leela with a shrug. “I stayed.”

That did intrigue him. “Why?”

“I decided I could help,” she explained.

Poul paused and then, after briefly playing with his communicator, said, “I suppose I should venture back to the control deck. Let’s see if this fleeting moment of sanity will remain.”

“Yes,” she agreed, but she frowned after him as he led the way out.

*

They were still standing about, eerie statues that moved in the corner of his eye.

“Look,” said Leela, at his side. She kicked at one sharply. It tottered and then fell against the wall, lying at a crazy angle. "It is harmless now."

Poul gave her a sharp glance. “Yes, very clever. Don't do that again.”

“I only thought-.”

He clenched his trembling hands into fists. “Well, don’t.”

*

“Oh, look who it is,” said Uvanov when they arrived at the control deck. “Toos, it seems Poul has finally deigned to grace us with his presence.”

Poul smiled uneasily and put his hands behind his back. “I don’t think I’d have been much use up until now.”

“Ignore him,” said Toos. “How are you feeling?”

The Commander said, “We need all the help we can get. This is no time for him to hide in his quarters, whimpering -.”

“We’ve been here almost continually for the past two days,” explained Toos, putting a hand to her head in weariness.

Uvanov rounded on her. “And who won’t even hear of trying to activate a robot?”

“I can’t believe you’re serious!”

Uvanov leant forward. “There’s you, me, a madman and a savage left here and we’re in the middle of nowhere. What exactly do you propose?”

“I don’t ever want one of those things near me again.”

Poul swallowed, but he intervened, as he always had before. “I’m well enough to be of some use, although I agree with Toos. No robots, thank you. Besides, Leela is not to be completely discounted, surely?”

“She learns quickly,” said Toos, giving the younger woman a smile. “Of course she will be of some help.”

Uvanov only glared. “You’re all mad. I wonder how you plan to explain her presence when we return.”

“No need,” said Poul airily. “Tell them the truth – we found her out in the wilderness. That should keep them busy, searching for indigenous life-forms that don’t exist.”

Toos put her hand to her injury, more out of habit now than pain. “I should think that it will be a lot more difficult to explain the rest of it.”

“No,” said Uvanov, changing his mind. “I tell you what’ll be the hardest thing – explaining why we returned home half empty.”

Poul folded his arms. “And the irony is, he's probably right. The riches and glories of lucanol above everything else, isn’t that how it is?”

“Oh, it’s all very well to have principles now,” he snapped. “Last time I saw you, you were a screaming wreck. Nearly got us all killed. And if you’re not properly well yet, I don’t think I want you anywhere near my control deck.”

Poul paused to glance across at him. “And it’s a pleasure to see you, too, Uvanov.”

"How long before the rescue ship arrives?" asked Leela, not bothering to conceal her impatience with all three of them.

Uvanov said, "Soon."

"Not soon enough," added Toos, with feeling.

*

He leant back against the wall, sheltering in an alcove, shaking again and refusing to meet her gaze. “Why don’t you go away, girl?”

“I will, if you talk to me like that again,” she said.

Poul closed his eyes. Call it whatever you liked, his condition was something to be ashamed of, something that made him either an outright freak or a man with a dangerous secret in his society. “Yes, laughable, isn’t it?”

“I see nothing funny about it,” she said. “I told you. The Doctor explained many things to me and I understand a little. I said I did not like the robots, either.”

He gave a bitter smile. “You didn’t break down over it.”

“No,” she said. “It would not have been much use.”

Ah, yes. _Useless_ , that was him.

“I can help you,” she added. He looked at her curiously. She was such a mixture of ignorance and wisdom. She watched him now, confident in her claim.

He found he was choking back hysterical laughter. “Can you? I don’t think so. They know what happened – Uvanov and Toos. It’ll be on my record. What use is a man with Robophobia to the Company?”

“Then leave,” she said, as if it were simple. “Find another life for yourself. The Company cannot be all there is. There must be other places – other worlds, even. I would do it.”

“Yes, I daresay you would. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could. I’m unfit for anything but my own civilisation and as it turns out, I'm probably not even fit for that.”

Leela laughed at him. “You _are_ stupider than you look,” she told him. “I know you are a hunter, a man of cunning. You knew what the answer was before, though no one else but the Doctor did -.”

“And then I hid from it - crumbled into nothing.”

She faced him. “I am a warrior. I fight if I can. I said I could help you.”

“Yes,” he said, his tone dry. Her words provoked another troubled memory, something he had been wondering since he had been able. Now he managed to ask the question. “Where is it?”

“It?”

“D84, then,” he said with reluctance. “What happened to the thing?”

*

They knelt either side of the robot, still lying where it had fallen, all the other things that needed to be done taking priority.

“The Doctor said that there was nothing we could do.”

Poul looked at her. “So that’s both of us broken and useless.”

“You should stop saying that,” she said. “It is not helpful. You will heal, in time. That is what people do, unless the wound is fatal.”

He gave a short laugh. “How very simple you make it seem.”

“And _you_ sound as if you would rather not be well again.”

He studied her more carefully. She was as sharp as that knife she carried. “Do I? Perhaps I'm not worth the trouble, merely a weak specimen who will fall apart again. Recovering might only be a waste of time.”

“It is not like that,” she said, shaking her head. “The Doctor explained about this Robophobia and I think I understand. I said you are a hunter. You watch people for signs and read them truly. Who killed this man? Who is lying? And you work out the answers. There were such in my own tribe.”

Maybe her reasoning was simple, but as he had already been forced to acknowledge, she wasn’t stupid and her way of looking at things was intriguing. “And as someone who reads those signs I’m more prone to be disturbed by the fact that robots lack them?”

“It seems so to me,” she answered carefully. “It could be worse.”

“It could?”

She nodded. “Think of your Taren Capel. He was brought up by robots -.”

 _Ah._ He followed her drift. “Clean, ordered, efficient, speaking only when needed – no confusing signals contradicting their words -.”

“No body language,” said Leela.

Poul continued, “And being back among his own kind – messy, noisy, inefficient, unreliable, greedy -.”

“It drove him out of his mind.”

He placed a hand on the broken robot’s head, feeling the jagged edges. It was cold and unmistakably metal, wires visible from the damage done by the Laserson Probe and the Doctor's deactivator, not human at all and certainly not corpse-like. The inward panic that had been constant at some level or other ever since he’d admitted the truth behind the killings receded for the first time. It wasn’t what Leela had meant, but after all, the true murderer had been human in the most fundamental sense.

Yes, there had been two madmen hiding their secrets on Storm Mine 4, but better to be the sorry victim of Grimwade’s Syndrome, too interested in humans to cope with the relentlessly silent robots than the genius driven into insanity through being too like a robot himself to live with his fellow human beings.

He smiled.

“What is it?”

Poul got to his feet. “You’re strangely wise for a savage.”

“Am I?”

*

Uvanov caught him in his quarters later, when Leela was finally resting. Poul wasn’t too pleased, but it was another curiosity and he let him in.

“How are you feeling?” his commander asked, with apparently some effort at concern. In fact, it might even have been genuine concern.

Poul shrugged.

“Yes, stupid question,” said Uvanov and returned to the subject of their previous real conversation. Poul had forgotten that in the overwhelming panic that had followed, but on his last private encounter with Uvanov, he had accused him of being a murderer and confined him to quarters. Evidently, now his commander wanted to make sure that in the unlikely event that the Company still listened to a word their undercover agent had to say, he’d understand the truth.

He barely listened. “I knew,” he said.

“And the Company,” added Uvanov, out of nowhere. “Lot of hypocrisy and lies. Making out anything approaching Robophobia is abnormal. You see the things as background noise – furniture. Start to notice them and there are times when everyone’s this close to running out screaming.”

Poul wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to that.

The commander grinned suddenly. “Still, I finally fixed the workings to send up a satellite flare-up for help.”

Poul put a hand to his mouth, hiding amusement.

“Who knows whether that’s good news for any of us, though,” added Uvanov. “Depends what attitude they take.”

That was only too true.

*

On the following day, Leela accompanied him down to check on the motive units and asked him to explain what he was doing.

That proved particularly difficult, since on one or two occasions, he was merely looking at the wiring and ensuring nothing was lose and couldn’t really say what all the connections did. It wasn’t his area of expertise. Dask and Borg had tended to see to this sort of thing. And she caught him out every time he tried to gloss over something.

“You do not truly wish to die, do you?” she asked, once he was finished and had come out with another self-deprecating comment.

Poul turned.

“Because I could kill you, if that is what you want,” she offered, drawing her knife.

Poul surveyed her and realised he should have known. “No, I don’t,” he said, although he knew that meant it was the last time he would be allowed to express that false wish in her presence. He decided it was time to stop and challenge her. “And you wouldn’t, even if I said yes, would you?”

He walked on past her and she sheathed the knife again, unsure whether to smile or to frown.

It was probably about then that he decided the only course of action was to keep her as curious about him as he was about her.

And if Kaldor City flung up its hands in horror, as it undoubtedly would, then a warrior and a hunter would find a way around that.

*

“Why did you stay?” he asked her again, much later.

Leela frowned. “I said. I wanted to help.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “Well, it did not seem to me that anyone else was ready to help you-.”

Ah, yes. _Pity_. As he suspected. _Pitiable wreck of a man_ , hadn’t they been his own words?

“You like me, don’t you?” she asked.

He watched her – yes, he was a hunter, reading the signs of someone who was the most human person he knew.

“Don’t you?” she asked again, her assurance faltering, just for an instant.

“When you’re not lecturing me, or trying to kill me, yes.”

She smiled in triumph. “Then it is all right.”

“Yes. More than all right.”

Leela leant forward to kiss him, briefly but firmly. “And you _will_ get well.”

“Yes,” he said, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “I rather think I will.”

***


End file.
